About Jeff
JEFF PIERSON has written extensively for over three decades about the people, products, and companies transforming the global energy industry. As the author of Battery Revolution, Jeff brings his first-hand career experience into a sweeping story about the promise and pitfalls of advanced technology development.
Q & A
In his debut novel, Battery Revolution, Jeff Pierson shows us how a creative story about two technology companies struggling to control rogue AI on the power grid serves as a unique educational resource for students, company teams, and self-learners of all ages.
Q: What caused you to write this book?
Jeff: I didn’t plan on writing a novel! In early 2024, I was involved in a junior executive training concept with an online education company. The plan was to help STEM students and young professionals gain business operations skills, which they could then promote to executive recruiters and our network of small to medium-sized employers.
Q: What was the result?
Jeff: We fell prey to a textbook mentality. We created courses—like how to work inside an organization and how to persuade people to execute plans—but the fact is, people learn best by falling into situations where their abilities are tested. So I decided to shift gears, to write an original story about parts of my own life, and what sort of understanding people need for an entrepreneurial career.
Q: Where does Battery Revolution fit in terms of a book genre?
Jeff: It’s business fiction, like previous management-oriented novels such as Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal, or Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? I wrote the book so it could be read in different ways. The first way is when you’re assigned to study or work in technical areas—like energy storage, power grid operations, industrial manufacturing, supply chain, infrastructure security, or AI automation—and your professor or boss wants you to dive in the details of how technology gets adopted into commercial products. So you read the entire book to capture the arcane shop talk and familiarize yourself with industry jargon. I just didn’t think I could leave that stuff out, because that’s how Amelia and some other characters think and talk in real life! But there’s another great way to enjoy the novel, too, and that’s by skimming over the learning sections and just following the suspenseful plot. That’s where truly personal human conflicts and decisions exist. Even with a few wildly improbable scenes, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine living and working in this world.
Q: What central issues did you explore in the book?
Jeff: The core question is the one nobody can really answer: Who decides how we produce, store, and deliver electricity to meet all our expanding needs? Underneath that key concern are plot threads showing our societal anxieties about machine control, and how our individual mindsets and fears may influence openness to change.
Q:Talk about your protagonist, Amelia Chen.
Jeff: Amelia is a bright materials scientist born, like her parents, in Southern California and getting her PhD in Pittsburgh at the start of the book. She’s an all-American kid at heart—personable and confident as a battery researcher, but after her remarkable discovery, she gets caught up in the tech world and thrown off kilter. The most interesting aspect of Amelia’s story might be how she confronts her preconceived notions of what success and happiness really mean.
Q: How did you pack so much technical subject matter into a suspenseful, easy-to-read novel?
Jeff: I layered the writing, with one track showing the early stages of developing an energy technology venture, and another more imaginative story about human beings working inside and around that venture. I drew on what I knew about battery storage, fund investing, policy making, and business consulting, conducted research to fill gaps, and got help from people with more expertise in physics, the power sector, or book writing than I will ever have.
Q:Who is your target audience?
Jeff: College and graduate students studying business and entrepreneurship, apprentices, the energy and power industry, as well as career professionals, corporate teams, investors, trade associations, policy makers, or people looking to advance or learn or pivot into new areas. Plus avid readers who enjoy learning new things about frontier industries, of course.
Q:You’ve described this book as an “ongoing learning experiment” both for yourself and for readers. What do you mean?
Jeff: We don’t know how the story of our electricity grid ends. There’s an unsung human element in managing power technology, and there are big ethical dilemmas we need to face in the near future.